Quiet Read Saves Weblinks For Later Reading [Mac]

I’m a huge web geek and I spend hours, literally, crawling the Internet for cool apps and ideas for my next article. Sometimes I’ll stumble upon a really great application, then another one and another. Before I know it, my browser is filled with opened tabs and Safari is hogging up all the memory.

I would use a social bookmarking website but honestly, I don’t find them very useful since I’m almost always on my MacBook and I hardly use another computer. In this case, the perfect solution would be a desktop app to store all my links of interest so that I can go through them slowly after I’ve settled down.

In a previous article, I’ve detailed the steps needed to use Stacks to store URL’s so that I can browse them later. This minimizes bookmarking clutter since it provides an alternative location to temporarily store bookmarks. The problem is, I tend to forget about the URLs after a while. The Stack doesn’t exactly yell out, “Hey, look at me! You have 20+ sites yet to read here!” I needed a more centralized solution that would display the number of sites I have saved but haven’t yet read.

That’s exactly what I found with Quiet Read.

This app sits quietly (no pun intended) in the menu bar awaiting links. Whenever I’m in the middle of a power search (you know, those frantic searches where you open lots and lots of webpages in the hopes of finding the thing you’re looking for but hardly ever do) and I think that I’ve found a seriously awesome app, I’ll drag the link and drop it over Quiet Read.

The indicator refreshes automatically to display the number of items it currently holds. That’s one of my favorite features; I don’t get that when using Stacks. In fact, nothing else happens whenever I add a link into Quiet Read, proving it to be really very unobtrusive, thus permitting me to carry on with my power search or whatever it is I was doing.

Now, allow me to elaborate. What exactly can you store in Quiet Read? Basically, any web link in almost any form can be saved. I can click and drag a link from any browser; in this case, I’m using Safari, and drop it in the menu bar icon. Links are listed chronologically, not alphabetically — which again, is really great because I can determine the order in which they were saved. I can also click and drag the favicon from the address bar and drop it into Quiet Read. Additionally, any highlighted (selected) URL can also be dragged into the app.

Now, maybe I feel that some of the URL titles don’t really work for me. Some of them aren’t very descriptive. Well, Quiet Read allows me to edit them by Option-clicking on a title. When I’m done reading a saved site, I simply click on the menu bar icon, select the title and press Command-Delete to remove it from the list. Easy peasy.

I like Quiet Read because of its simplicity and the fact that it doesn’t do much more than it’s supposed to. No frills — just the way I like it.

Quiet Read is completely free and runs on Snow Leopard.

What do you use to put aside websites to read later? Bookmarks? Read It Later Firefox extension? Tell us in the comments.

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